Summary: Two more royal arms from ice and fire dungeons. Ranking up through tier 4 hunts.
---
The Sword in the Waterfall
-The rumor of another royal tomb leads me to this Cleigne waterfall, and a frosty cave behind it.
Y’all. I’m a SUCKER for ice caves. (As long as slipping isn’t a mechanic.)
-It’s beautiful, and the piano music is wonderful and spooky as always. XV is knocking it out of the park with its dungeons.
-The Ronin enemies here still give me a bit of trouble with their one-shot strike.
-After some exploring, I find the Tomb of the Wanderer. Is that a bow?
-I can now conjure the “Armiger,” my arsenal, when a circular Armiger bar fills. It fills as I attack and defend. All abilities are strengthened when royal arms are active.
Not quite sure I understand that since I thought these were all just weapons I got, but it seems there’s a whole new mechanic I get to learn.
-After picking up the weapon, Noct gets another headache. He gets another vision of that close-up face, and a region I couldn’t pick out. Maybe that was the Disc of Cauthess?
NOCTIS: “A hole in the ground… something burning… the Meteor?”
-Yeah, this has to be Titan waking up or something.
-there’s another vault door inside here. Can’t open it yet.
-Huh. A map icon suggests there’s a full dungeon behind the vault door, not just a single boss.
-The Armiger ascension tree is unusually small. Just four abilities, one free and the rest costing a combined total of 96 AP. That’s nothing. Maybe more nodes open as I get more royal arms.
---
The Way of Gods and Kings
-Back to Lestallum, where another vision headache hits. We get to pan out a bit and see a dude who looks a bit like Kratos from “God of War.”
-We head to a part of Lestallum overlooking the Disc, and SUSPICIOUS STRANGER is here. The guy who gave us the coin back in Galdin Quay and was acting… well, suspicious af.
-Like any normal upstanding citizen, he starts reciting a creepy poem out of nowhere:
“From the deep, the Archaean calls.
Yet on deaf ears, the gods’ tongue falls.
The King made to kneel, in pain, he crawls.”
He urges us to go visit and listen to the Archaean. That must be the guy beneath the Disc.
-Ah, his name is Ardyn. I’ve heard his name before but can’t remember any context for it.
-He’ll lead us to the Disc, and the party INEXPLICABLY agrees to follow him (even if they’re cautious). HOW DO YOU TRUST THIS DUDE EVEN ONE IOTA? HAVE YOU LOOKED AT HIM FOR A HALF SECOND?
If I’m being super charitable, he has a few potential Vincent Valentine vibes, but even Vincent just seemed broody. Ardyn has a note of evil humor about him, like he’s pulling one over on us.
---
Hunts
-Hit hunter rank 4: Ranger!
-After a hunt by Longwythe Rest Area, I get a cutscene with Prompto. He and Noctis have been friends for about five years, since the beginning of high school. So I’m putting them around 18 years old.
-Something about Prompto’s tone make me wonder if Prompto has his own crush on Noctis.
-He’s very direct. Always felt inferior to Noctis, and uses his jokiness to hide his insecurity.
I’m not surprised. I do the same thing. But this still feels like clunky storytelling to just have the character blurt out his motivations so early in the game and not show it to us gradually.
Like, Prompto says he’s not good with people like Gladio is. Me? I’ve never even remotely seen Gladio be good with people! I’ve seen him be gruff, not social, persuasive, or charismatic.
-Had an EPIC fight against a catoblepas. I love when big hunts getting special music.
-I love less how the game doesn’t think the catoblepas is hard or interesting enough so they have to throw waves of magitek soldiers into the mix. WHY?????? STOP IT.
-I’m starting to run into some hunts that obliterate me, even being close to their level. One against two iron giants, another against five coeurls.
-A giant snake blocks one path, a 54 Midgardsormr. A slightly smaller VII Midgar Zolom.
-HOLY SHIT I GOT HIM!!!! He destroyed me first, but got him when I came back at 44. I not sure how I should’ve dealt with the poison spray but still!
-Going to try the coeurl hunt that destroyed me one more time. So it’s five coeurls in a pack. I craft a Firaga spell with 438 potency and go back to work.
Aside from their murderous nature, they’re sleek and snuggly!
Victory! Way better this time.
-Same goes with my second attempt on the pair of Iron Giants for “A Roaring in the Night.” I make two specific adjustments:
1) When it does the “suck everyone into my hand” thing, I warp strike away.
2) Instead of healing with the tech bar, I used Ignis’ “Overwhelm.”
Overwhelm dealt most of my damage. Just absurd amounts. Played defensively while building the tech bar and then hit it.
-Heady from this success, I even try the level 41 hunt that one-shot me a few sessions back, “Things of the Past.” Three necromancers that just one-shot me, but I was in the mid-20s then. I’m 45 now.
*a necromancer turns Noctis – Ignis’ protectee, liege, and dear friend – to stone.*
IGNIS: “A petrifying sight, indeed.”
-Despite Ignis’ puns in the face of death, this fight goes great too.
[Non-rhetorical question: Do y’all also find Ignis’ “Overwhelm” wildly good? I feel almost like I’m cheesing encounters with it.]
-When hunting some flans, my Armiger attack one-shot them. Is using the armiger bar the spark-looking magic that some enemies (like flans) are vulnerable to?
-Hit Hunter Rank 5: Slayer, and with it, level 47. (At this point, I went to the waterfall for the next main story quest.)
---
Side Stuff
-I’m having trouble getting past the feeling like using the car to auto-drive me to quest locations is cheating. It’s a nonsense, gatekeeping, judgmental “you’re just cheating YOURSELF by not running/chocoboing around,” and it makes no sense. I instant-port in FFXIV all the time.
I have to get over it. The car is a part of the game. Especially when there are so many side quests that have me hopping around the map.
-Some Takka backstory: Cid caught him trying to steal food in Hammerhead and took him in.
-I see a plume of smoke rising at night from the Disc of Cauthess.
-A side quest led me to a fourth tomb. A hunter note says the greatsword was robbed by daemons, taken to Castlemark. Haven’t found that place yet.
-Visited the volcano in the southwest of Cleigne, the Rock of Ravatogh. A mysterious mountain that froze mid-eruption. Ifrit is said to lie inside. So we got Titan in Duscae and Ifrit in Cleigne.
-The Rock of Ravatogh is a dungeon! And… it’s open to me now? Let’s check it out.
It blows my mind that I can just stumble across this and explore. It’s a feeling I remember specifically from playing the original Legend of Zelda on NES as a kid.
-One path is just walking on embers leading to a lava pit. No dice. Maybe I come back here later and Ifrit emerges to fight or something.
[Later edit: I did have to come back here for one of Vyv’s photography side quests.]
-Hah! There’s even a campground on the volcano.
-There’s a big nest with giant eggs in it. No bird is home and I can’t break the eggs. It also looks down on what looks 1,000% like a boss arena, but I can’t seem to trigger anything here.
-OH SHIT THERE’S A TOMB UP HERE! Tomb of the Fierce. I get a new royal arm, a mace-looking thing.
-This arm is listed as the 9th of 13 on my list. Am I way farther than I’m supposed to be here?
-I explore the rest of the place but don’t really find anything else to do. I’ll come back later.
-Vyv is my favorite side character so far, the guy who runs Meteor publishing. He sends me off on a long series of photo shooting that takes me around Duscae, to the volcano, to imperial bases, all around.
He’s affable, outgoing, and has an awesome shirt.
-I’m butting up against my fishing limits. Tried pulling in a huge fish in the aqueducts by Insomnia and even with my strongest line, rod, and reel, I didn’t have enough to pull it in.
-It’s strange how much this game is just side questing so far. As I write this, I have yet to go to the waterfall cave and I’ve played 48 hours. I know I don’t HAVE to play this way, but I like doing whatever I reasonably can before progressing, especially since I don’t know what’s time sensitive or what’ll get taken away from me.
-Vyv wants me to photograph a ghost. The ancient painting Lakshmi is haunted by an evil spirit. This is a straight-up FFVI call-back.
---
A Few Random Things
Chocobos make great pillows:
A beautiful giant cockatrice:
A chocobo rainbow:
---
Next time: following the nice Mr. Ardyn and probably trying some rank 5 hunts. I don’t plan to be super completionist about them though, since I saw some in the 60s.
